Shoot Four - Work Diary

For my Fourth Shoot, I decided that I wanted to expand my range of photographic techniques by trying something very different to my previous shoots. As I wanted to capture the busyness of an urban environment, I decided that a good way to do this would be to shoot using a long exposure and capture the motion blur created by crowds moving. Additionally, I realised that I have no animation sequences in an urban environment for my final project, therefore I decided to shoot the crowds using continual shoots to create into an animation as well as the motion blur images.



1/125, F5.6, ISO 100

This is the animation I created from my shoot. I shot using 1/125 and used a tripod to avoid camera shake and I needed the camera to move as little as possible between each shot. I used continual shoot mode so that there would be as little space between each shot as possible, meaning the resultant animation is smooth. The images that make up this animation are very dark in tone, creating connotations of the dark side of urban life. There are also several adverts visible throughout the animation, which represent the consumer nature of urban lifestyle and the constant need for advertising products and brands. I created this animation using Premier Pro; I dragged the images onto the video timeline, selected them all then right clicked and selected speed/ duration. In this menu, I dragged the duration of each image to be as short as possible, which was one frame. From here, I rendered it as a 24fps .mov file. This animation was successful, as it shows the movements of people in an urban environment. The fact there are some images which have larger space between them means the people are shown speeding up and slowing down at various points, which I feel shows the rapid changing of pace of people in an urban environment, being slow in quiet periods and fast in busy periods such as rush hour and the Christmas season.


0.6 Second, f22, ISO 100

This is one of my straight images from my shoot. I shot using 0.6 of a second, as I wanted some motion blur yet a longer exposure longer than 0.6 of a second would have created too much motion blur, possibly to the point of the subject disappearing from the frame. Also, due to the reasonably bright outdoors conditions, having a longer exposure would have likely over exposed the image. I shot using an aperture of f22 to counter this, and as a result, the image has a very wide depth of field in which everything is in focus. I shot this image on a tripod as I wanted to avoid camera shake, which would have been clearly picked up while shooting handheld due to the long exposure. I edited this photo in Photoshop as I felt the image appeared flat. I increased the contrast to +20, as well as increasing the saturation of the colours to around +15, as this makes the colours appear more saturated and vibrant. I also lowered the brightness of the image by around -15 and adjusted the curves of the image, as the original image was slightly overexposed.

I feel that this image can create many connotations about urban life. The use of heavy motion blur, in which the subject is distorted and is only barely recognisable as a person. I feel that this blur creates connotations of Urban life being fast paced and busy. The subject being highly distorted can be linked to the anonymity of walking through an urban environment; you will likely only see a person once due to the volume of people in the area, and you will forget their face in seconds after you've seen it.
The image has very saturated colours, which links to the presence of the Starbucks Coffee sign. The colours being bright and saturated represent the consumer nature of urban environments, as bright colours are used in advertising to entice the viewer. The Starbucks sign definitely represents the prevalence of consumerism in urban environments also.